Several years ago I was asked by a bookseller friend from a local store called Rebel Books to be one of the people who would read aloud something at an event to commemorate Banned Books Week. Rebel was an anarchist cum lefty cum vegetarian bookstore here on the buckle of the Bible Belt that has since—no surprise—closed. But while it was going it was a fun and interesting shop that dared almost anything. And since “daring” is a fast-disappearing virtue in this society I always tried to say “yes” to anything they asked of me. The bookstore had recruited local celebrities, politicians, librarians, teachers, writers and journalists to participate in the event. (I, by the way, am none of these things, but at the time I had some reputation in town as a “booklady” for my long tenure as manager of another independent bookstore.) Each of us had agreed to stand up in front of a crowd and read for about five or ten minutes from one of our favorite banned books. Most of the town book people were present, including the book reviewer for the local paper, our more high profile local writers and university professors, and I believe even a few television personalities and city politicians.
Anyway, I must not have read the instructions on the invitation very carefully.
I decided to read a selection from a collection of short stories by Dorothy Allison called Trash. Specifically, from the story titled “A Lesbian Appetite,” where the narrator is remembering all of her lovers by the different foods she used to eat with them. I wasn’t sure the book had ever actually been banned anywhere, but I was sure it would have been at least challenged if certain people had ever discovered it on the shelves of the library. If a story as innocuous as And Tango Makes Three—a children’s book about a family of penguins—could end up on a banned books list, then Trash must be a shoo-in.
Allison herself is a controversial author. Her excellent novel Bastard Out of Carolina has been both praised for its honesty and compassion and reviled for its explicit depictions of child sexual abuse and brutality. Trash, which Allison wrote earlier, refers to “white trash” and is not, perhaps, as mature in its style, but the same raw honesty and fierce passion of the writer is there. It was one of the few books I read during my own coming-out period to really reach me, that seemed to speak to my own experiences of falling in lust and love. I chose the book to share for the simple reason that it was important to me, and I wanted other people to know about it.
I practiced for my five to ten minutes. I practiced reading different passages aloud in front of a mirror and in front of my cats. My girlfriend, who has a background in theatre, coached me. And because I had chosen a sexy scene, I dressed for the part as well. My bookstore customers were used to seeing me in dowdy long skirts. For this occasion, I put on the three-inch red high heels I started wearing the day I hit forty, my tightest pair of black jeans, and the slinkiest black lace top I owned. I undid my long hair from the bun that usually contained it, and let it fall free.
I am not, by nature, an extrovert. But I am, by nature, enthusiastic about literature and good writing. I was counting on my enthusiasm to carry me through any last-minute bouts of stage fright. So you can image my shock when I pulled into the store’s tiny parking lot and discovered that our Banned Books Week Readathon was set up not inside the small, funky store but outside, in the back lot. There was a microphone and a PA system. Just over the low brick wall, on the other side of the lot, there was a neighborhood with the kind of houses that have kids’ toys strewn throughout the backyard. Although only twenty of us were reading, the lot was soon filled to standing room only, and people began to perch themselves on the low walls and parked cars, where they could easily hear since the PA system was set high.
I was scheduled near the end, which is how I realized that not only would everyone in the neighborhood hear what I was about to read out loud, but that everyone else had chosen selections from a list of banned books put out by the American Library Association. We heard excerpts of Judy Blume, Huckleberry Finn, and Jack Kerouac. A bit of Tennessee Williams. Parts of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Color Purple. I had obviously missed some important instructions. I pulled my bookseller friend aside and told her I hadn't chosen a book from that list. No problem, she said. “I picked something from Trash,” I hissed sotte voce to her. “You know, the lesbian food and sex story!” I looked out doubtfully at the crowd. There were some baby strollers in the audience. There were some stuffy politicians who were at more risk of hearing something to scare them than the babies in the strollers. But she didn't call her store Rebel Books for nothing. “I love that story,” she said “Go ahead, it’ll be fine.”
So I sauntered up to the mic and said that I was going to read from a story that, if it hadn’t been banned yet, probably would be by the time I was done reading. I began with a scene in a small kitchen where two women, who have been teasing each other all evening, are cooking eggplant for dinner and start to get more than a little carried away. “I pushed the eggplant slices between her legs. . .,” I breathed into the microphone, “she was slick like peanut oil. . .” I could feel myself blushing hotly; luckily, it was dark enough no one noticed.
When I finished there was absolute silence for a few seconds. “Uh oh,” I thought, and wondered if I had just alienated the entire literary community of Wilmington, North Carolina. Then one of the college guys in the audience whooped and started clapping. I got a (mostly) standing ovation, and I was told later that the ones who didn’t stand were too busy squirming in their seats. (If I ever give up book reviewing, I may have a career in the phone sex industry.) The whole Readathon was a success—for the store, which attracted a good crowd, for raising the public awareness of Banned Books Week, which received plenty of media attention the next day, and for me and Dorothy Allison, since quite a few people came up to ask me about the book I had read from, and I don’t think their interest was entirely prurient.
I like to tell this story because it is funny and sexy, but also because I had an epiphany that night, while I was reading this scene of two women making love on the kitchen floor. I realized, suddenly, that the squirming was the point. My own discomfort and embarrassment was the point. We weren’t up there to read from books to prove how safe they were. They aren’t safe. They are dangerous. Even a book like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret—every young girl’s favorite story about what it feels like to hit puberty—is dangerous in a society that prefers to control young women’s sexuality.
The corollary to living in a country that values freedom of speech, where anyone is free to say anything, is that we must accept the responsibility of deciding for ourselves what to think or what not to think. Because as dangerous as Judy Blume might be to a young girl's peace of mind, it is far, far more dangerous for that young girl to grow up not knowing how to think at all, or only letting other people do her thinking for her. “One of the reasons I think that our youth is so badly educated,” the writer James Baldwin once said, “—and it is inconceivably badly educated—is because education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind. You have to teach young people to think, and in order to do that you have to teach them to think about everything. There mustn't be something they cannot think about. If there is one thing they cannot think about, then very shortly they cannot think about anything.” Baldwin was a man who knew about repression and censorship. Almost every book he ever wrote, from Go Tell It On the Mountain in 1953 to Just Above My Head more almost thirty years later, has been called “obscene” by somebody. I think about him quite often, in fact.
It is true I had the boys squirming in their seats when
I read them “A Lesbian Appetite.” But I could have had them squirming out of
fear if I'd decided to read from the more vitrolic essays of Malcolm X, or
horror and disgust if I had chosen to read from Mein Kampf.I wouldn’t have received that standing ovation, but it would have served the same purpose—it would have shocked them out of their complacency and made them angry and made them think. It would have given them a nudge towards that “certain daring, certain independence of mind” so utterly necessary to a free country, and their own free existence within it. “A Lesbian Appetite,” by comparison, was a relatively “safe” story to tell.
Other authors mentioned:
Jack Kerouac
Tennessee Williams
Malcolm X
Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at will read for books. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of varying number of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.
